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Survey: The Powers and Pitfalls of Small Group Models

The G12—short for “Groups of 12” or “Government of 12”—model is intense. In time, a leader is involved in three weekly meetings—the small group that they lead, the G12 group where they are discipled by their leader, and a G12 group where they are encouraging and equipping the leaders under themselves. Joel Comiskey, in his helpful book From 12 to 3, has suggested ways to apply G12 principles in a North American setting in an intentional but less intense way.

The model is impacting churches around the world, but few are experiencing the same outstanding results as ICM. There is also debate about exactly what makes ICM’s small group structure so successful. Although many people are intrigued by its G12 oversight system, some people feel that it is actually the church’s assimilation and discipleship system is the key to their growth.

The small group system that I oversee has not “gone G12,” but we have gleaned very important lessons from this model. It has been tremendously helpful for us to initiate Encounter weekends at our church using the Encounter God material available from Touch Publications (www.cellgrouppeople.com). We have also begun to use external multiplication as one valuable option for launching new groups. In fact, based on our church’s experience, I have concluded that, in most cases, external multiplication works better than internal multiplications of groups. (Realize that there are about five ways to multiply groups and that the best method varies from situation to situation. But that is the topic of another article!)

Free Market Model

In the late 1990s, the church that Ted Haggard pastored—New Life in Colorado Springs, CO—experienced a turning point. It was a large church of 4,800 people, but its growth rate had declined to four percent. At that time, the church had 80 home groups that were organized geographically and met to discuss that week’s sermon.

The paradigm shift that changed the direction of the church’s small group ministry occurred at a meeting of the church’s executive team. As they discussed the need to better connect people in the church, the small groups pastor, Russ Walker, asked Haggard, “Pastor Ted, do you attend a small group?” In response, Haggard gave several reasons why he was not in one the small groups that he was encouraging his own members to be involved in. He said, “I do not want to meet with people I don’t enjoy” (p. 34). Since the groups were organized geographically, Haggard confessed getting in a group would mean spending time with people he wouldn’t normally choose to relate to. He also didn’t want to be a group that discussed the sermon. He did not want to get stuck in a group with no way out. And he did not want anyone messing with a group he was in by telling it that it had to multiply.

Haggard’s honest answers to his small groups pastor’s question proved to be the foundation for New Life’s revamped small group system. They designed a system with these characteristics:

• Groups are organized around common interests, not geographical proximity, to draw both church members and unchurched into relationships—hence the title of Haggard’s book, Dog Training, Fly Fishing, & Sharing Christ in the 21st Century.

• Groups have a clear start and stop with three small group semesters or cycles a year, so that people can easily join and leave groups.

• Discipleship is “by choice”—meaning that people will join groups or take classes that they need when they need them.

The key assumption behind New Life’s small group and discipleship philosophy is that people in the 21st century don’t want to be told what to do. They want choices. Another assumption is that, like businesses in a free market economy, healthy groups will flourish while unhealthy groups will die. So we should encourage a diversity of different types of groups and allow things to naturally thrive or wither.

In some ways, Haggard’s model is similar to the “Meta” model popularized in the 90’s by Carl George in his book, Prepare Your Church for the Future. Basically, under the Free Market and the Meta models, almost anything can be considered a small group, whether it is a group of home schoolers, a bowling group, a prayer group or a Bible study. Churches following these models sometimes claim to have a high number of small groups and an amazing percentage of their people involved in groups. But to a large extent, this is simply because their definition of small groups is so broad. For example, last year our church carefully counted how many adults were involved in our worship services and compared it to how many adults were involved in our small groups. Our worship services had an average adult attendance of just over 1,000 people, and our home groups had an average attendance of just over 600—so about 60 percent of our people are involved in what our church calls “small groups.” But if we also had counted the couple hundred people involved in the short-term groups that we call specialty groups such as ALPHA, marriage classes, recovery groups and other support groups—all very important groups!—the number of people involved in “small groups” would look much larger. Under a Free Market or Meta model, however, we could count these groups as well as our many sports teams, home school groups, several dozen ministry teams and the many accountability “mini-groups” that our church encourages. If we were to switch to a Free Market system, the number of people involved in “small groups” would immediately dramatically increase—simply because we would be counting things differently. I am not expressing this to say that they are counting wrong and we are counting right, I simply want to point out that when a church states how many of their people or what percentage of their members are involved in “small groups,” you need to look carefully at how they define “small groups,” especially if you are comparing them to a different church—like your own! The contrast in numbers between two churches might simply be due to a difference in definitions.